How can I integrate Voice over IP into my asp.net website so that user's can speak to each other through the site?
Thanks!
Without extra software (plugins) I don't believe you can at the moment with any mainstream browser (you probably would not want your computer microphone available to your browser as default for security reasons also, although plugins tend to get around this by asking for permission to access the microphone and camera).
Note that it is a non-trivial exercise to make this work reliably due to the need to work around NATS and firewalls - Skype and the new Google Voice chat feature for example dedicate a lot of their effort to achieving this reliably. If you decide to use a plugin it would be worth checking it handles this well (along with general voice quality). See the link below for some background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Traversal_Utilities_for_NAT.
Related
Chrome is on the verge of definitly break compatability with NPAPI, and IE breaking with ActiveX the future of Java Applets is dark. Currenty we actively use a secure applet for out client organizations that enables their users to upload a bunch of files from their file system to our servers with the click of a button. The applet has full access to any configured drive, including network drives.
With the imminent death of the applet this functionality is going to be lost if we don't find an alternative. I have already tried to explore different solutions, including the chrome FileSystem API but that is currently only available for Chrome (http://caniuse.com/#feat=filesystem) and has limited access.
Does anybody know about an alternative to keep supporting the much appreciated functionality? Unfortunately we are obligated to support all browser down to IE8.
I've written a post about this here.
Once Google Chrome was the first to announce that they won’t be supporting NPAPI anymore, they were also the first to provide a new architecture in order to rewrite your code to work on their browser. You can take a look on Native Messaging, which “can exchange messages with native applications using an API that is similar to the other message passing APIs”. The problem is that this approach only works on Chrome, is not something that you can adapt to other browsers.
A more useful approach is FireBreath, a browser plugin in a post NPAPI world. Check the words below from one buddy of the project:
“FireBreath 2 will allow you to write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX, or through Native Messaging; it’s getting close to ready to go into beta. It doesn’t have any kind of real drawing support, but would work for what you describe. The install process is a bit of a pain, but it works. The FireWyrm protocol that the native messaging component uses could be used with any connection that allows passing text data; it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausibly WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in some way. For now the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that should be pretty portable to other technologies.”
In light of the answer provided by Uly Marins I have researched the options suggested. Unfortunately these options weren't viable for our application, because the mayority of our users do not have sufficient rights to install third party plugins. Additionally the API is still in Beta which won't do any good in a stable production environment.
The main problem we wanted to solve was the abbility to delete files from the accessed folders. It seemed like one of the mayor goals of the removal of the NPAPI support was exactly to prevent this kind of possibility. Therefore we needed to reduce our goals to a simple solution that was still acceptable for our users, with the additional training on how to clear the selected folder manually (because most of our users are almost computer illiterate and needed to access network folders).
Long answer short. The requested solution is just not possible anymore and had to be replaced by a simpler solution and additional training.
Is there an in-browser, Flash-free method to view ebooks from Adobe Content Server?
We currently offer a library of c.50k specialist ebooks via a feature-rich "ereader" web-app (HTML5/JS based with various fallbacks down to IE7).
However, management want to be able to offer "downloadable" ebooks for "mobile devices". By this they mean a file that the user can download and read offline. Adobe Content Server is fine for this (if a little expensive, and a little hated by the users, but unfortunately it's becoming an industry standard...)
OK so if we adopt ACS, making downloadable-for-offline-reading a possibility, what are the options for online reading, assuming we want to use ACS for everything and not just offline? In other words ... is there an in-browser reader for Adobe Content Server?
Flash is not a possibility as a) a lot of the users us iPads (yes for online reading too) and b) a lot of the users have to use IE7 with no Flash installed (the NHS is a major customer).
I realise I might be asking for the impossible but I thought it would be worth hearing peoples' thoughts.
Please don't advise me not to use DRM, it's not my choice and I have already advised against using it. However we are contractually obliged by our suppliers to have "a DRM solution" for offline reading.
If there was a widely-available alternative solution to Adobe Content Server I'd be interested to hear about it. I have already integrated ACS once (version 3) and don't really look forward to repeat the experience...
There are a number of reader apps which support ACS, such as Sony Reader. Your readers can use those apps (after "sideloading" your books, a process which differs from reader to reader) to read the ACS books. I don't know of any browser-based reader, but it seems to me that the apps (which exist for all major platforms) should get the job done for you. These apps all keep local copies of books and work just fine offline.
I'm starting some research on skype programming. Is there one technologie for skype plugins or are there multiple frameworks or apis?
I'd like to make a plugin where user from my database can communicate with each other (video, audio, chat) over skype without seeing each others' real skype id's - is it possible? (I guess yes, I tried skycandy a couple years ago and it was actually the same)
any hints for realization?
primary platform would be windows, but maybe android/ios as well (are mobile versions plugin enabled?)
Is skype a good choice for the requirements or is there a better solution for a small project without budget?
Skype offers an API for its Desktop clients, Desktop API and an SDK for you build your own client.
The Desktop API is in maintenance mode and doesn't support newer features in the client and has a number of known bugs.
SkypeKit is fully supported but doesn't currently support Multi Part Video, at the time of writing.
Neither of these technologies can be used on mobile devices, in the case of SkypeKit its specifically prohibited in the licence terms, and you may never obscure the sending or receiving parties Skype name as this is prohibited.
For additional info please see http://developer.Skype.com
Allen Smith
Community Manager
Skype Developer
I need to implement video conferencing in a ASP.Net application.
We have cases that contains 3 users. Per case we need to set up a Video Conferencing possibility.
Are there any services or libraries to use for this functionality?
EDIT:
TokBox was a good service to use, however I need a solution to maintain on own servers now. Are there existing services that let me do this?
See here: http://www.red5chat.com/.
By far your easiest solution at this point will be to embed Flash into your ASP.NET pages. You can use Red5 as your media server backend if you want a free and pretty good solution. (You can also pay for back-end media server solutions like Wowza or Flash Media Server.)
You can in theory do this with Silverlight (see http://silverlightvideochat.codeplex.com/), but it's not nearly as sophisticated as the Flash solutions, i.e., the video codec isn't nearly as good, there's no AEC, noise reduction, etc.
As for HTML5, Google has open-sourced WebRTC, and it's working its way through the standards process. But it's currently supported by ~0% of the browsers out there. (It was released into the Chrome dev channel in mid January: http://www.webrtc.org/blog/webrtcnowavailableinthechromedevchannel.)
But the short answer, again, is "Use Flash on the client and Red5 on the server."
EDIT: With a little bit more client-side coding and Adobe's RTMFP solution, you can create a peer-to-peer Flash-based solution that doesn't use a server. It won't scale to more than 2-4 users per "room", but it'll have very low latency, and won't require you to standup and support a server. See here to get started.
Also, the production channel of Google's Chrome now supports WebRTC (and so does Opera). You can see a demo of it here. Firefox also supports a version of it, but the two aren't yet compatible, though achieving interoperability is a high priority for both dev teams. Neither IE nor Safari has yet announced support.
Tokbox also has a reasonably simple API that will allow you to use WebRTC when it's available (it produces higher quality audio/video than Flash), and degrade to Flash when it's not. It's free for 1:1 sessions or for less than 25,000 group minutes per month.
I am giving to upload functionality, i want that files must be scaned on Server side, Before they uploaded and then they are are saved on that server.
Is there any free available antivirus engines to scan the attachment on the server?
Thanks
You can't exactly "scan" the file on the client. However, some manipulation is possible, determined by the client security settings.
I believe it is quite difficult as browsers implement such functionality differently (Internet Explorer could use ActiveX scripting for example).
You could try to look into that perhaps.
Regarding free antivirus, I believe Google has the answer ;)
But seriously, Avast and AVG are both providing home users with free versions of their antivirus. Since you haven't said anything about your purpose of the server, I don't know whether using the free versions is legal.
If you're willing to pay a bit for a AV solution, I can recomend NOD32. That said, I should mention that I have no experience with the server version. I use the workstation version, which is very light weight.
Sure, depending on what virus-checking software you're going to use for the scan -- for example, the commercial product metascan offers an API to integrate your programs with many different commercial anti-virus products.
Before uploading is hard; you could rather check it after upload but before making it available for download. To do so you can use online antivirus services - but it's a very timeconsuming solution, and you should certainly use a separate thread or service - or scan it yourself, using one of the many available antivirus engines (a few of them are free, but the others usually cost very few, less than $10 per year).
EDIT: the most famous (for me, at least) open source antivirus tool is ClamWin, which is released under GPL. For free (as in free beer) engines, I can only suggest to search "free antivirus engine" or the like, not because I'm lazy but because I've never used one and don't feel comfortable suggesting things I don't know.